OT: A counter-argument might be, “Everything is going fairly well with a benevolent dictatorship.” Your experience with the PDA would indicate that it doesn’t look like you could organize all the owners to get franchising.
RP: The only way you could have an organization [of owners] is everybody pay into it. Then they buy into it, they just walk in and say, ‘I’m a member.’ You buy into it – whatever the money is it takes. To legitimize the sport, my concept is sell, for example, 35 franchises and leave it open for the remaining teams up to 43 to have a chance to buy in when one of the original 35 franchises becomes available. Just like it’s done in football or baseball.
You have established with a franchise, something that’s worth something because you are a guaranteed participant if you buy in.
OT: What do you think of the Car of Tomorrow?
RP: I think it’s time. I was confused with NASCAR because they’re trying to bring it in a little at a time. Why blend it in? Now we have two sets of cars we have to worry with for the next two years. We run 16 races with the new car and the rest of the races with the old car. We’ve got to upgrade and build “new” old cars because we’ve learned things, and our competition is upgrading and improving their old cars, so we have to do that, too.
We’ve got to build two fleets – they take different rear end housings, different A-frames. So we have to buy new parts for old cars because parts have a shelf life. It’s running the expense clean out of here [up].
OT: Any idea on what kind of money you’ve spent on the COT and upgrading?
RP: We just spend whatever it takes. It’s hard to be budgeted.
OT: NASCAR makes a rule…
RP: And we spend the money. The owners make NASCAR work. No matter what rule they send at us. If they come in today and say the first race is going to be at Daytona and you’re going to run it on three wheels, we’d figure out how to get around that race track on three wheels and put on a show.
No matter what the rules are, whether they are good, bad, or indifferent, we as owners make NASCAR look good. That’s our business, we’ve got to survive, we’ve got to compete. So no matter whether it’s a restrictor plate – we went to Talladega and they thought they were running too fast – come in Sunday morning and they give everybody a smaller plate. You don’t do that in professional sports, man.
Had no idea on what was going to happen. They knew we were going to run slower, but didn’t know if we were going to burn the motors up or whatever. But luckily the engine builders were on top of it enough the race was no different.
Except maybe that it hurt some engines more than others. It hurt the Dodge engine more than it hurt anything else. Because the Dodge is such a long engine -- the way the manifold distributes air it has so far to go front to back – the shorter the engine was the less the restrictor plate would affect it. The bigger they go with the plate, the better the Dodge engine is going to be.
I think they’re going to run Talladega next fall with the new car [COT] and they’re going to try that [larger plate] because the cars are going to run so slow because they are so boxy. That should put us more even with the competition than when we run at Daytona and the first Talladega race.
